


spit some blood at the camera

by misandrywitch



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Hawke Family - Freeform, takes place somewhere around the end of act2 and beginning of act3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 07:25:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2723750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories end well. People might die but there’s always redemption to be found. Stories don’t finish fights holding their guts in their stomach with one hand. Stories don’t have to listen to their uncles snore. Stories don’t let little brothers break their noses. Stories don’t wake up hungover.</p><p>Stories are forever. They don’t have to worry about missing anyone because one can always start at the beginning again. They don’t have to worry about dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	spit some blood at the camera

**Author's Note:**

> i've been thinking a lot about what it means to be the main character in someone else's story (and how it's never as easy as it sounds like it's going to be in the telling)
> 
> title comes from the song 'spent gladiator 2' by the mountain goats. i've never written da fic before be gentle with me

_"I’m just honored the Champion of Kirkwall still comes in here.”_

You’re at the Hanged Man. Because - well. Because of course you are. Because it’s too late to go anywhere else, and because Varric wants to play cards, and because you have nothing better to do and aren’t tracking down any carta members or hard-to-find ingredients and nobody is trying to kill you (yet, anyway) and everything seems pretty quiet (relatively, anyway), you’re at the Hanged Man. Really, those things feel like excuses. You’d probably be there anyway, if any of the above weren’t the case.

It’ll be, you’re sure, the kind of night where nothing much really happens but where everything means something and everything matters. You have never really gotten the hang of the games Varric and Isabela like but you push through the doors and wind your way past a few drunks to the bar counter. You’ve found its more fun to watch than to play - you’re very bad at betting. Can never keep a straight face.

Your friends are gathered around a table in the back of the room so you order a drink. It doesn’t really matter what it is, everything served here tastes more or less the same and gets better the more of it you consume.

“You can actually drink the swill here?” Fenris asks you as you cross the room.

“Pretty sure it’s done permanent damage to my insides, and my taste buds,” you say. You sit down, Varric starts expertly shuffling and then dealing cards, thumbs sliding over the deck.

“If you try to cheat me, Rivaini, I’m kicking you out of the game,” he says.

“Oh, but you’d miss me!”

“Fine, but I’m not responsible for what anyone else does to you.”

“Here you are, serah,” the bartender deposits a collection of mugs and glasses filled with ale and whiskey of questionable quality on the table in front of you. “On the house.”

“No way,” you protest. He starts to shake his head. “Look, take it as a donation then-- use it to get the bloodstains out of the floor or something. Uh, still sorry about. Not beating up those raiders in your bar-- they were asking for it. Literally. Could have asked them to step outside I suppose.”

“Alright,” the bartender says. “A donation then. I’m just honored the Champion of Kirkwall still comes in here.” He walks off. You pause.

 

 

The title doesn’t really fit you yet, maybe that’s it. Or you aren’t used to hearing it from Corff, who really hasn’t moved from behind the counter of the Hanged Man in years. People certainly know you, now. Certainly greet you that way.

But that greeting, it gives you pause.

 

 

You aren’t exactly a stranger to this bar. You’ve been in here at least once a week (and, during a few pretty bad weeks, every night) for years. Two of your best friends live here. You’ve spent the night here, lost and won money here, been in countless fights and accidentally flirted with Donnic and taken off various articles of your clothing in a variety of inebriated states and generally kept the place in business over the years. The thought that you’d ever wander into any other seedy hole in the wall in this city is absurd. The thought that you’d stop coming back here because of this title slapped on you - Champion - even stranger.

You laugh, say “You couldn’t keep me away, even if you wanted to and I know you want to, even you can’t enjoy this kind of property damage,” stare into your drink. It’s just a word, a title, a description - but it gives you pause.

Words have power, but not on their own. Words need someone to say them, and stories need someone to tell them. That’s if you believe anything Varric has to say (and you do, mostly). By themselves, words are just words - just jumbled collections of syllables or squiggles on a page. Sometimes they are just that and nothing more.

 

(Sometimes, of course, they are everything - a forgotten language slowly reclaimed along with its relics and magics and mirror, the ability to sound out words on a page a step towards sloughing off shackles, a litany of injustice written to inspire action, a tale spun to enrapture onlookers because telling tales is what you live and breathe and who you are, everything.)

 

You’ve been many words, descriptions that only have meaning because of how they are said and who they describe. Mage. Apostate. Two words, sometimes different and sometimes similar. Daughter. Sister. The ones you’ve been the longest. Things that used to define you, shape you - those things are also lost. You started off as both and now you can’t be one and you’re barely the other. Barely a sister, not a very good one at any rate, so bad it barely counts.

Can you still claim to be something if its gone? Or worse, if you’ve failed at it?

You try not to think too much about these things when you can help it. You have trouble being emotionally honest - it is, you’re willing to admit, a major character flaw but one can’t be good-looking and talented and completely honest and balanced all the time. But you don’t really have that much to say so it doesn’t really matter. More words, that don’t have meaning even when you write them down. The things he would say to you probably can’t be contained in a letter - no room for the scowl.

 

 

You aren’t just words, of course, and that’s the problem. You’re flesh and blood and you can’t do all the things you’ve supposedly or not-so-supposedly done without picking up a few scars. Physical ones that can be touched (or shown off repeatedly when drunk to a room full of onlookers because honestly, how often does one get disemboweled and almost die, yes I suppose I have had enough - of your bad attitude, thanks). But other scars too, ones that can’t be seen but that you can feel anyway - scars for a father, for a family, for missteps you can’t take back. What you should have done. What might have been.

Those are the ones that really hurt. Those questions - how would things be now if I’d done the right thing? If I’d been faster on the draw? If I’d told him not to go? If I’d paid more attention?

There’s no point in being morbid or in repeated semi-religious self-flagellation, and it really feels like a bad joke. Tragedy - the inherent mark of comedy. Is something really funny if it doesn’t also make you want to throw up? You ought to write that in a letter (Carver will hate it). Bethany’d tell you to stop being so terrible. Mother -

 

 

Well. What’s the point in dwelling? Mother never found your jokes funny anyway. Father, of course, would have agreed.

You got a lot of things from your father. Traits: your wit, how you never know quite when to shut up, the spark of light at the ends of your fingers. And gifts too, or burdens: the responsibility to take care of them (another title - eldest).

I’ll make the name Hawke one to be proud of. With nobody here to see it. Hilarious, really.

 

 

Champion.

 

 

A silly word without much meaning. Champion. Of Kirkwall, no less - Kirkwall needs more than a champion. Kirkwall needs a nanny. A time-out. A talking-to. All that means - Champion - is that you did what you always do. You picked a fight and you won it. Single combat duel. Varric’s telling makes it sound so romantic, but all that really happened was you wanted to protect your friend, and you fought, and you won. Big deal. That’s you - always in time to save the day.

You wish you could go along with it more (for their sakes if not yours), but defacing your own statue in the middle of the night is so damned funny and you really aren’t a hero, you’re really not. Heroes ought to have more profound things to say. Heroes probably never climb out of windows in their own homes to escape talkings-to by the guard captain because of defaced statues. Heroes probably drink better ale.

But you understand, a little anyway, that words have power. Older sisters cast long shadows - apparently champions do too.

You’re standing on a precipice of change - Kirkwall itself is teetering on the edge of it, balanced on a knife point or maybe dangling from the end of a chain - and that change has changed you. Renamed you. Now, people you have never even met are telling and retelling stories of the things you’ve done (and quite a few things you couldn’t pull off even in your dreams) when really you haven’t done anything different. You’ve always been jumping into fights and winning them. You can’t count the number of times you did that as a kid, the number of times your family had to pack up and move again because of it (not that any of you really minded, you were together, you had each other). Everyone thinks you’re taller than you are, expects it because that’s what they’ve heard in the stories.

Stories end well. People might die but there’s always redemption to be found. Stories don’t finish fights holding their guts in their stomach with one hand. Stories don’t have to listen to their uncles snore. Stories don’t let little brothers break their noses. Stories don’t wake up hungover.

Stories are forever. They don’t have to worry about missing anyone because one can always start at the beginning again. They don’t have to worry about dying.

 

 

Because you’re a woman, not a story. A real, flesh and bone woman with scars inside and out. A woman who hurts, a woman who fucks up, a woman who never really knows what direction she’s leading anyone in. A woman who misses her sister and brother and mother and never figured out how to grow tall enough to fill in the space left by her father. A woman who really wants another drink. A woman who is getting really worried that someone is going to strange Isabela if she doesn’t stop hiding cards in her corset.

“Can you go through one game without doing that or is that just outside of your control?” Anders is frowning and Isabela is smirking and you are back in the conversation like you never left it. Fenris is winning (he always wins). Merrill is losing, but having a good time anyway.

“If I didn’t, how would I beat you all?”

“You aren’t beating all of us, you know.”

“Is it me? Am I doing better than I thought?”

“Sorry, Daisy.”

“How is Fenris so good at this game?”

“Bloody elf’s just good at bluffing.”

“What, sweet thing? Angry you’re going to have to borrow money from Hawke again? It’s too bad your magic tricks can’t produce more coin.”

“If you don’t stop cheating I will show you what they can do-- by lighting your cards on fire.”

“Maybe you ought to,” you say. “I mean, if you want everyone to have a good time.”

“What do you mean?” Merrill asks before anyone can stop her.

“Because then we’d all be having a blast!”

“Maker’s breath, Hawke--” Varric groans. “That was bad, even for you.” The groan travels around the table. Isabela laughs so hard she spills whiskey down her front. You grin and get up to get another drink. The bar counter is crowded so you turn around and glance back at the table. Anders and Fenris are glowering at each other, and Isabela is giving Merrill a tip on what card to play next, and Aveline has her back turned to the table to talk to Donnic, standing behind her. Varric winks in your direction.

 

 

A funny thing, the meaning of words. Completely subjective and changeable, too. To you, family always meant those titles, those relationships you carried: big sister, eldest daughter.

Family. A word with a different meaning to everyone sitting around that table. A name, a responsibility, an elder brother’s betrayal and a father’s signet ring: family. A husband lost and a husband found: family. A distrustful clan and the drive to help them no matter the cost. A crew of men, dead on the rocks or lost to the waves. A sister, name little more than a faint memory. An absence of, something taken away in childhood. Some pretty lonely things.

But of course, here you all are together, drinking probably the worst ale in the Free Marches and losing at cards.

Varric would probably say something profound, like how every family has a story and this story has created a family (a little mismatched, doesn’t ever stop arguing, nobody has each other’s eyes). Maybe he did something, in the tale he’s been telling. Caught them all together, the threads of the lives of these different people and their different words. Caught them all here in this moment.

Words have meaning. That meaning can change. Families can grow bigger. Maybe that’s enough.

 

 

You might ask Varric to add in a few more dragons when he tells this one, though.

 


End file.
